Crossposted from Town Called Dobson
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I read this factoid today and it floored me. Only 20% of women in Afghanistan have ever seen a doctor. The Amnesty International report dealing with the nation BEFORE the US invasion is just as horrid.
Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world.
Only 14% of women have trained attendants with them during childbirth.
The literacy rate is still at an abysmal 9%.
From Oread Daily:
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women’s rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. “Forgive me,” she said. “I can’t.” She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I’d been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I’d watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I’d watched women collide with cars they couldn’t see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I’d never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
Thank-you George Bush.